There are several steps that a business can take to boost its placement in search results, and one of the most effective is to add a blog to your website.
A well-crafted blog can garner visibility for your company and can propel your business to the top of search engines in an organic search. However, there’s more to creating blog posts than just keyword stuffing and developing related blog content.
Instead, businesses need to focus not just on having and updating a blog but creating a blog for search engine optimization, or SEO.
All About Blog SEO
Blogs designed for SEO have a range of carefully considered elements outside of relevant content.
SEO blogs have a keen sense of their target audience. They also include internal links and link building strategies that propel their blog content’s visibility. The content also has well-honed background features, like image optimization and a thoughtful page title, that appeal to search engine bots.
However, if you’re new to blog writing and blog SEO, navigating the varying steps to propel your website above your competitors can be difficult. An experienced content marketing partner can help with every aspect of your blog content, from proper keyword research to a content strategy that catches the eye of search engine crawlers.
Therefore, it’s helpful to learn the foundational building blocks of blog SEO and how to optimize a blog post for SEO, which starts with understanding the importance of blog SEO.
Why is Blog SEO Important for a Business?
How Does Blogging Improve Search Engine Optimization?
Different Methods that Can Optimize Your Blog for SEO
Write Effective Meta Titles and Meta Description
The Art of Writing Blog Posts for SEO
Partner with a Blog SEO Expert to Get Ahead of the Competition
What is Blog SEO?
Simply put, blog SEO is the process of writing and optimizing blog posts so that a web page or business organically shows up at the top of a search engine results page. There are many supplemental strategies to optimize blog content, including keyword research, quality, valuable content writing, on-page SEO, and link building.
Why is Blog SEO Important for a Business?
Outside of search results (and more on that in a moment), there are a number of ways that exceptional blog content can boost your business and position as an authority in your field.
Per a 2022 LinkedIn round-up of statistics, 68.5% of people say that a blog increases the credibility of a brand. Furthermore, 70% of people say that blogs are the best way to conduct brand research before making a connection or purchase.
In addition, businesses that publish four or more blogs each week see a 3.5-fold increase in website traffic. Therefore, writing a blog generates 94% more links to your website, which is another solid way to boost your rankings in a Google search.
So, even without the inherent visibility, your website will receive search engine rankings. SEO-friendly blog posts with high quality content can increase brand recognition and loyalty with your new and/or existing customers.
How Does Blogging Improve Search Engine Optimization?
In order to understand how blogging can enhance your ranking in search engines, you need to understand how a Google search works.
When the internet was in its infancy, search engines like Google, Bing, and other platforms would look at individual search queries and find web pages, blog posts, and other content that matched specific keywords or phrases. This meant that blog posts could be stuffed with relevant target keywords, with little attention to the quality of the content, in order to receive a top spot on search engine results.
In our modern era, this is no longer the case.
Today, an SEO-friendly blog post requires much more than splattering related keywords; instead, search engines prioritize quality over quantity. The main goal of Google search is to match relevant blog posts with a user’s search intent. Google search rankings are now determined by a balance of focus keywords and well-written content and blog articles that position a web page (or a business), as an authority on the topic.
As such, businesses that create content for blog posts must do a lot of work and focus on a number of moving parts to get a top spot on the search results. Therefore, this process ranges from the initial blog post ideas to the Google Analytics data that will determine if your overall SEO strategy is a success.
Different Methods that Can Optimize Your Blog for SEO
A business can employ a variety of easy and more complicated SEO strategies to maximize blog posts for SEO, which start before the first blog post introduction.
Keyword Research
The first step for maximizing blog SEO is to determine the focus keywords that internet users are entering into search engines to identify businesses or services like yours. There are plenty of online tools available to help identify these focus keywords rank. For example, Google Search Console, is a tool from Google that explains how Google crawls, indexes, and serves websites, allowing businesses to optimize search performance.
Some focus keywords may be obvious and align with the general description of your business, such as “Online florists” or “Accountants in Dallas Texas.” One of your primary keywords should simply be your company name, as well, in order to build that brand recognition and loyalty.
But additional keyword research is required to ensure you aren’t missing the phrases and words that drive business to your website. An expert partner in blog SEO can help you identify these more elusive or long tail keywords (3-5 words in length) and can help ensure they are generously applied within your blog posts in a way that maintains quality content.
SEO Tips:
- When you conduct keyword research, look at your competitors, including their page titles, meta descriptions, and featured snippets. This will give you an idea of the focus keywords that land companies like yours at the top of search engine results pages.
- Don’t forget to include semantically related keywords, especially for keywords with troublesome spellings. Most internet users don’t ensure their search terms are spelled correctly when using a search engine. Therefore, keywords that might not be relevant but similar to your primary and focus keywords should be included.
Write Effective Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions
There is a lot going on in the background of a blog. When you publish a new blog post, it’s important to ensure all elements of your blog post are maximized for SEO. This includes your blog post title, meta description, and the other elements that will appear in Google’s featured snippet (if applicable), as well as the overall search results page.
Title Tag
- Your meta title, or title tag, is basically your blog post title. It should contain a brief but keyword-rich overview of the specific blog post. While Google doesn’t specify the optimal length for a blog post title tag, however, to improve blog SEO, title tags should be in the 50–70-character range.
Meta Descriptions
- A meta description informs and interests users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular blog post is about. It can also dictate the content in Google’s featured snippet of your web page. Your blog post meta description should be roughly 150-160 characters in length, although Google often changes meta description best practices, so this optimal length may vary in the future.
Blog SEO Tip:
- To enhance brand recognition, use your company name in at least one title tag and meta description on your web pages, but don’t go overboard! You want to avoid keyword stuffing throughout your blog posts, including the meta descriptions and page titles.
Optimize for Mobile Devices
Mobile searches account for more than half of all Google searches. Therefore, it’s essential that your blog posts and all of your web pages are optimized to look good on all devices.
Website platforms, like WordPress sites, will generally and automatically adjust the display of your posts on different devices so that your website looks good regardless of screen size. However, older website builders may not operate the same way. Again, an experienced blog SEO partner can help review your website’s fundamentals to ensure it is optimized for mobile devices, desktops, and everything in between.
Blog SEO Tips:
- When creating your first batch of new blog posts, make sure you test on different devices! Bring up your blog posts on multiple devices to see how it displays across the board.
- Pay careful attention to the size of your videos and images. Larger, wide images with dimensions set in stone by HTML tags will display awkwardly or take too long to load on smaller mobile devices.
Optimize Images
Images, videos, and other multi-media elements can help boost your blog SEO and create content that is engaging and user-friendly. However, the key to using images when writing blog posts for SEO is to include alt text or an image tag.
Your images and videos may not display in all browsers, so your alt text encompasses what the image is about. In addition, Google looks at these smaller elements of blog posts, like alt text, when determining their ultimate search engine rankings.
Develop a Link Building Strategy
High quality backlinks and internal links will go a long way in enhancing your blog SEO. Important and authoritative websites can add a boost to your rankings in search engines. Additionally, it can help increase the number of inbound links, which also catches a search engine’s attention.
When it comes to internal linking, ensure your blog posts are sprinkled with relative web pages throughout your website. For example, include links from other blog posts, contact us pages, or links that drive home the point of your blog content. Internal linking is easy and gets easier with more blog posts added to your site.
As for external links, it’s helpful to link out to websites that are considered to be experts on a particular subject, such as Wikipedia or major information hubs and media organizations. Linking to outside sources is also a good way to enhance your inbound links, and these larger hubs of data may take notice and link back to your site in return.
SEO Blog Tips:
- When it comes to some of these “background” features, an SEO plugin can help! SEO plugins can tell you what formatting changes you need to make. Also, it can inform you of how to optimize your posts and pages for search engines, resulting in better blog SEO throughout your archives.
- It’s helpful to take stock of your existing web pages and blog posts to ensure they are optimized for SEO. An SEO partner can conduct a review of your website and optimize your blog even for past blog posts, and in new blog posts to come.
The Art of Writing Blog Posts for SEO
Once you have the background details covered, it’s time to write content that will optimize your blog posts for SEO. Here are a few SEO tips to write content that will show up in search engines and keep your readers engaged:
Put Your Keyword Research to Good Use
- Add as many relevant keywords as possible to your blog posts without them sounding choppy or like it was created by a keyword-generated machine. You want your content to flow but still have enough keywords to connect with search engines.
Write Enough Words
- Length plays a big role in optimizing your blog posts for SEO. To optimize blog posts, ensure all posts are at least 300 words long and optimally much longer. The recommended length is at least 1,000 words for a regular blog post and at least 2,000 words for long-form content.
Post Regularly
- To maximize your blog posts for SEO, make sure you post at least once a month and, ideally, much more often. Businesses that update their websites regularly with new blog posts and new content tend to stay at the top of search engines’ results pages.
Conduct Research on Your Blog Posts for SEO effectiveness
- Most important, you need a tracking system to identify how your blog posts have impacted organic traffic to your website. You can use Google Analytics or other statistical tools that will outline how people on the internet found your business.
Partner With a Blog SEO Expert to Get Ahead of the Competition
The above SEO blog tips and guidelines are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to blog SEO. In order to effectively optimize your blog to show up at the top of Google searches and other search engines, you need a complete SEO strategy, from keyword research to monitoring organic traffic.
Remember that while crafting blog posts for SEO and fine-tuning your website for high search engine rankings, your competitors are too. Therefore, you need an extra, experienced resource to propel you above a crowded playing field.
This is where ContentFirst Marketing can give you a competitive edge in blog SEO and all aspects of SEO throughout your website.
With a complete strategy that covers all the intricate details of generating blog posts for SEO, you can see an increase in your organic traffic. Therefore, you can stay ahead of a vast internet of competitors vying for the same target audience.
If you want to optimize your blog, remember that you don’t have to go it alone.
Reach out to the SEO blog professionals at ContentFirst Marketing today for a free review of your website, blog posts, and SEO strategy from the ground up.
Partnering with ContentFirst Marketing, you can ensure your blog posts solidify your reputation as a leader in your industry.
